The Empty Grave

by Jonathan Stroud

  With a horrid nuzzling, the spirit-head bunted up against the side of the living one and burrowed its way within. In an instant, it had disappeared. Penelope’s head jerked and drooled. Intelligence snapped back into the eyes. The woman raised her hand and wiped her mouth.

  “This is an atrocious thing,” I said. “A wicked crime.”

  “Oh, come,” Marissa said. “It looks odd, I grant you, but the benefits greatly outweigh the drawbacks. Besides, what alternative was there? My own body was worn out years ago—you see it in the cabinet behind you. Finally I lay near death, surviving only by pure will. The doctor who tended to me was a fool. He would have had me coffined up and buried! But my spirit raged for life. Instead of accepting death, it jumped across to a living vessel, my dear granddaughter, Penelope, who at that time was still a girl. I had to wait a few years, while the body grew—and during that time I was forced to let my daughter, Margaret, run my company.” The face twisted unpleasantly. “Margaret was weak in mind and body—she was not a good ambassador for my organization. Fortunately I was soon able to…remove her and retake control.”

  “Marissa…” the spirit said. The golden coils stirred in warning.

  The woman nodded. “Ezekiel grows impatient. He wishes to finish you. What else is there to say? You can die with full understanding. I have told you all.”

  “Not quite,” the skull said. “There’s just one point, Lucy. If Marissa doesn’t need her horrid old body anymore, why does she keep it in here?”

  That was something I’d been wondering, too. It gave me my final, desperate idea. The golden spirit was moving in to kill me. One of its coils of light, bent like a tentacle, flowed in my direction. I ducked away from it, and as I did so, reached out behind me into the cabinet. I caught hold of the stand that supported the twisted, blackened corpse and wrenched it free, pulling the whole thing outward. It toppled from the cabinet, fell across me, striking the floor hard. One of the legs fell off. Marissa gave a cry of pain and rage; she sprang down to clasp the body, and the golden coil of light jerked back to give her room.

  Me? I picked up the ghost-jar and ran at full tilt toward the elevator.

  I didn’t get far.

  Air exploded out across the penthouse suite. Sofas and coffee tables shifted, papers and magazines were blown skyward. The jar and I were sent tumbling head over heels across the carpet.

  I wrenched myself up again. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that the body was already back inside the cabinet. Floating papers drifted to the floor. Two figures were coming toward me through them: a radiant spirit and a woman in a dark green dress.

  The spirit waved a hand. The mirrors on the wall behind me cracked and shattered. The glass didn’t fall. The fragments rotated outward. They shook like they were trying to pull themselves free. Great jagged shards broke clear and shot toward me like horizontal hail.

  “Oh, not this again.” I sprinted for cover. “I hate this Poltergeist stuff!”

  Glass ripped the air around me. I threw myself over the top of the nearest sofa and fell to the floor behind it. Here I lay, pressed between it and the wall, as the rain of glass sliced into the cushions on the other side. The point of one especially long fragment jabbed right through the sofa back, just above my ear. The barrage ended. Shards dropped onto the carpet. I could hear Marissa’s heels crunching through them.

  The jar had spilled out of my hands and was lying horizontally next to me, the ghost’s face gazing into mine. It would be a lie to say it looked any nicer than usual, though the grimace it wore was possibly an attempt at a smile.

  “You know this is the time, Lucy,” it said.

  I stared at it. “I can think of something.”

  “You really can’t. In thirty seconds you’re going to die.”

  I bent low, squinted under the sofa: yep, there were Marissa’s high-heeled shoes crossing the glass-strewn carpet with Ezekiel’s radiance shimmering alongside. Little twists of ice formed on the carpet where the spirit passed. Gold tentacles were feeling their way toward where I hid. No respite.

  “The hammer’s in your belt,” the skull said. “Use it.”

  There was blood on my face, and just above my hip. So the glass had struck me. My side felt odd: cold and not my own. I grinned. “I was waiting for a real emergency.”

  “Okay, fine, and while you’re waiting, why not die here behind an ugly sofa, alongside all the dust balls and earwigs and coins people have lost. You want that?”

  “No.” The first tentacles were probing under the sofa, radiant and bitter cold.

  “You want that old hag to win?”

  “No.”

  “Do you trust me?” the skull said.

  I looked at it. I didn’t see the hideous grimacing face. I thought of the sardonic spiky-haired youth standing on the Other Side.

  “Yes,” I said. “Sort of.”

  “Then break the bloody glass.”

  I scrabbled at my belt, felt for the little hammer. My fingers were wet with blood, and the handle slipped through them. I caught hold and drew it out.

  Already it was almost too late.

  The sofa moved in front of me. Slowly at first, then with sudden violence, a psychic force swept it aside. I was left exposed, my back against the wall, with the ghost-jar in my lap and the hammer in my hand.

  My enemies approached.

  In some ways it was hard to know which of them was living and which was dead. They were very close together. Marissa Fittes’s dark dress shimmered with other-light that extended from the figure at her side. Her face was ghastly with it. Her outline was wreathed in tendrils of gold light, making it curiously insubstantial. By contrast the ghost beside her, radiant and smiling, seemed almost solid, fizzing with energy.

  “Poor Lucy,” Marissa said.

  And I suppose I did look pretty poor right then. I was lying in my own blood. I had my hair over my eyes. My clothes were torn and dirty….You know the rest. I gazed up at them through narrowed eyes.

  “Aren’t you going to beg?” the ghost asked.

  “She won’t,” Marissa said. “Let’s get it done.”

  The shape drifted forward. I raised the jar, and had the satisfaction of seeing Ezekiel hesitate.

  “You’re not wary of that pathetic spirit?” Marissa said. “It’s little more than a Phantasm.”

  “Something stronger than that. But it doesn’t matter. He’s trapped.”

  “No,” I said. “Actually, he’s not.”

  With that I raised the hammer, and struck it down against the jar with all my strength.

  And the stupid thing bounced off. There was a slight chip in the glass, but otherwise all was as before.

  The ghost in the jar had been braced as if for a mighty impact. It opened one eye and looked up at me. “What are you doing? Don’t tell me you can’t break it.”

  “Hold on.” I struck the jar again. The hammer bounced away.

  “Ohhh, you are so useless,” the skull said.

  With mounting panic, I tried again. This blow was even more ineffectual.

  It gaped at me in disbelief. “Hopeless! A toddler could tap this open!”

  “Don’t criticize me!” I roared. “You’re the one who suggested I use a stupid hammer!”

  “I didn’t think you’d be too feeble to lift it! Why didn’t you say?”

  “I’ve never broken a silver-glass jar before! How did I know how tough they were?”

  “You might as well give it to that dead cockroach over there! He’d have more chance than you.”

  “Oh, why don’t you just shut up?”

  “This,” Marissa said, “is priceless. But all good things must come to an end. Good-bye, Lucy. After you’re dead, I’m going to seek out your companions, and watch Ezekiel suck the flesh from their bones. Think of that happening to your darling Anthony as you die.”

  “Or,” a voice said, “we could save us all a lot of trouble, and finish this right here.”

  Marissa whirled around. Th
e spirit rotated more slowly, its radiance flaring black with anger. I raised my head, but I didn’t need to look to know what I would see. It was everything I’d hoped for, everything I’d feared.

  The doors to the vestibule were open. Lockwood was standing there.

  In so many ways, he didn’t look like Lockwood. Not how he liked to be seen, so well-dressed and elegant in his long coat and slightly-too-tight suit. The coat was long gone, and the rest of his clothes were a wonder to behold, so ripped were they, so torn and peppered with ectoplasm burns. His shirt in particular had more holes in it than a string net bag; some of La Belle Dame’s skimpier outfits probably had more fabric in them. One of his shoulders was gently steaming, and there were great clawed lacerations all the way down the sleeve on the other arm. His hair was gray with salt and magnesium; his bangs sagged over a cut eye. His face looked puffier, more swollen, more discolored, and more generally beat up than I’d ever seen it. In short, he was a mess. He didn’t look like Lockwood at all.

  And yet at the precise same time he was more himself in that instant than you could possibly believe. The way he held his rapier; the casual stance he adopted as he stood between the doors; the slight smile playing at the corners of his mouth; the darkly flashing eyes that scanned the room, that took in its horrors and showed no fear. Above all, his twofold lightness—the way he radiated energy and brightness (so much stronger, so much purer than that coiling golden fog emanating from the floating spirit), and the way he seemed physically lighter, more buoyant, than everything around him. He’d always been less tied down by the weight of things than the rest of us, less restricted by life’s drag. These qualities were his signature; they ran through him like a watermark in paper. And they did so now, more than ever, transcending the outward blemishes, those scrapes and rips and scratches, and the weakness of his body.

  Just standing in that doorway, he was a living rebuff to Marissa. Forget her grotesque attempts at keeping young by body-hopping, by scurrying to the nearest, prettiest shell. This was how you did it. This was how your spirit stayed strong. This was how you looked death in the eye and defied it. Lockwood had fought his way up here to save me, past all the ghosts downstairs, and he had arrived at the perfect moment. I understood all that as I sat against the wall, bloodied and defenseless, and I loved him for it. My heart sang.

  And yet I really didn’t want him there.

  “Hey, Lucy.” As he met my gaze, his smile became a grin. “Having fun?”

  “I’m having a lovely time.”

  “So I see.” He came toward us across the carpet, walking carefully through the broken glass and scattered magazines. I saw that he was holding one of the snub-nosed electrical guns in his left hand. He had his eyes on Marissa and the floating ghost, and whether it was the gun or Lockwood himself that unnerved them, neither of them moved. “Do you need some company?” Lockwood asked me.

  I smiled back at him. “Always.”

  A discreet retching sound came from the jar in my lap. “You two make me feel ill,” the skull said. “Still, he’s got timing. Got to give him that.”

  Timing. Yeah, Lockwood had it, and I didn’t.

  Because I hadn’t gotten the job done.

  Marissa had said I’d had a deeper motive for coming to the penthouse suite alone, that I’d wanted to join forces with her. Well, she was half right. There had been a deeper motive, and I only truly understood it now. I’d wanted to get things finished on my own; I’d wanted to do it with Lockwood left behind. Now he was here, and despite the joy and relief he brought me, the old fear sank back down onto my shoulders. It was the fear that fed off the predictions made by the fortune-telling machine at Tufnell’s Theater; that clung to the memories of the empty grave waiting for him in the cemetery; that, above all, stemmed from my meeting with the ghost that wore his face, who had said that Lockwood would die for me.

  So my heart sang, and my heart despaired, which was pretty much the usual combination for me whenever Lockwood was around. But he was here, and that was that. And I wasn’t going to stay sitting with my backside on the carpet anymore. I forced myself to stand, blood welling from the glass cut in my side.

  I wasn’t the only one to decide to act. The spirit Ezekiel had become markedly less golden than before. The crown of fire and the coils of light that spun about its figure had darkened almost to blackness. Now the coils extended; they shot toward Lockwood, who raised the gun and fired. A horizontal lightning bolt cut straight through the spirit’s body, cutting a jagged hole in the center of its chest. Ezekiel gave a horrid keening and bounded backward across the room, almost as far as the desk. The ropes or tentacles of light that connected it to Marissa were suddenly pulled thin. She gave a yelp of pain, and hurried after her companion, high heels slipping on shards of glass.

  Lockwood walked over to me; he reached out, touched me with the fingers of his rapier hand. “You’re hurt,” he said.

  “Not badly.”

  “That’s what Kipps said, too.”

  “Kipps! Is he—?”

  “We got him to an ambulance. I don’t know, Luce…it’s touch and go. He was still making grumpy comments as he went off, so perhaps he’ll be okay.” He looked along the room at the two retreating shapes. “So here they are….Anything I need to know?”

  “Couple of things. The ghost can shift stuff like a Poltergeist, and its Source is the bracelet on Marissa’s arm. Her spirit is inside Penelope’s body, possessing it, but she’s got her old body shut in that cupboard, and I think she still needs it somehow. That’s about all.”

  “Nice summary. You wait here.” Lockwood grinned at me. “Don’t get mad! I have to say it! I know full well you won’t pay any notice.”

  I smiled back. “That’s just the way it is, I’m afraid. Be careful of Ezekiel.”

  “I’ve got the gun. I’m a better shot with it than George. He almost blew Barnes’s head off downstairs.”

  “Barnes? Barnes is here?”

  “Yes, and Flo. Flo’s the one who got him down here—I’ll tell you about it later.”

  He moved away from me, firing the gun, making Marissa scream and dive behind an enormous potted plant. The electric bolt set the branches alight. Part of the carpet was smoldering. Near the desk, Ezekiel was busy knitting its plasm together. It raised a spirit-wind, sent it shooting outward. The blast was less powerful than the two it had directed at me earlier, but still strong. Lockwood somehow remained on his feet. He fired the gun again.

  I could see my rapier lying halfway across the room. I made to get it—and then stopped. I looked down at the ghost-jar sitting on the floor. The face inside seemed thoroughly disgruntled with the proceedings.

  “Well, you won’t be needing to get me out anymore,” the skull said. “Good old Lockwood. Came just in the nick of time. Looks like he’s got everything nicely under control.”

  “Looks like it.” I picked up the jar, carried it to the nearest coffee table.

  “Don’t you stay hanging around with scum like me. You scurry on after him.”

  “I will in a minute.” All the magazines had been blown off the table, but there was still a small stone sculpture there—a horrid pyramid of geometric pellets, like a pile of cubist horse droppings. I set the jar on the table, lying it on its side, and picked up the sculpture.

  The ghost behind the glass had been pulling derisive faces: all at once it paused in doubt. “What’s that for? Are you going to lob it at Marissa?”

  I raised the sculpture above my head.

  “Being brained by some fossilized horse poo would be a pleasing way for her to—” The skull fell silent. Its face was suddenly still.

  I closed my eyes and brought the great weight down on the side of the jar with as much force as I could muster. There was a crack, a sharp odor, a hissing noise. I lifted the sculpture and struck the glass again—

  “Hey! Careful! You could smash a skull, going on like that.” The voice came from close by. I was no longer alone. The spirit of a t
hin gray youth with spiky hair stood at my side. He was cloudy and translucent, but much clearer than when I’d seen him on the Other Side. When I looked down, I saw that one side of the jar had completely caved in. Pale green ichor was spilling from the cracks, floating up and outward like mist into the air. It trailed across to merge into the substance of the youth.

  An old brown skull sat grinning up at me from the base of the broken jar.

  I tossed the sculpture aside. “There. You’re out.”

  The ghost was gazing at me. “You actually did it….You did it. Even though you didn’t need to…”

  “Yes. Now, I’m a little busy….” Lockwood had fired at Ezekiel again, but this time the glowing shape had dodged the strike, flexing its torso aside. It seemed to be recovering its power. Tentacles of blackness searched for Lockwood, who lopped them off with the tip of his sword. I couldn’t see Marissa. I made for my rapier at a run.

  “You do know what you’ve done, Lucy?” the skull called after me. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me now! I’m free! I could kill you—I could kill Lockwood fast as thinking….”

  “You could!” I didn’t look back. “That’s up to you!”

  I paid the skull no more attention, but scooped up my sword from where it lay.

  Lockwood was swinging his rapier smoothly, slicing off the probing tentacles. I chopped at a couple, too. Black smoke was coming from the muzzle of the gun.

  “Battery’s almost out,” he said. “I used it all up on the Butcher Boy downstairs. It would be nice to see the last of Ezekiel, Luce. Might be worth you getting the Source off Marissa, if you can.”

  I nodded grimly. “Not a problem.”

  I went in search of the woman, keeping clear of where the raging spirit thrashed and coiled. I found Marissa on her hands and knees, crawling along on the far side of the desk with her hair over her face. There must have been a drawer or some kind of a secret compartment back there, because when she stood up, she had a rapier in her hand.

  Marissa Fittes kicked off her high heels and stepped toward me. That lovely face didn’t look quite so good now; somehow its contours no longer quite aligned. The cheekbones seemed too high, the chin too protuberant—as if the old woman’s spirit inside was almost showing through.